Moore's Law is running out of room

SAN FRANCISCO - For decades, the computer industry has been guided by a faith that engineers would always find a way to make the components on computer chips smaller, faster and cheaper.

But a decision by a global alliance of chipmakers to back away from reliance on Moore's Law, a principle that has guided tech companies from the giant mainframes of the 1960s to today's smartphones, shows that the industry may need to rethink the central tenet of Silicon Valley's innovation ethos.

Chip scientists are nearly at the point where they are manipulating material as small as atoms. When they hit that mark within the next five years or so, they may bump into the boundaries of how tiny semiconductors can become. After that, they may have to look for alternatives to silicon, which is used to make computer chips, or new design ideas in order to make computers more powerful.

In 1965, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore first observed that the number of components that could be etched onto the surface of a silicon wafer was doubling at regular intervals and would do so for the foreseeable future. In 1965, the densest memory chips stored only about 1,000 bits of information. Today's densest memory chips have roughly 20 billion transistors.

To replace what the semiconductor industry has done for nearly 25 years, an organization called the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers said Wednesday that it will a create a new forecasting system, called the International Roadmap for Devices and Systems, that is intended to track a wider range of computer technologies.

One technology could be so-called quantum computing, a cutting-edge reimagining of how computers work that taps quantum physics - a branch of physics that explains how matter and energy interact. Another could be graphene, a form of carbon and an alternative to silicon that could produce smaller and faster transistors that use less power.

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